We Tracked 141 Bank Accounts for 90 Days. The Fed Didn't Move Once.

The standard explanation for a savings rate is that it tracks the Fed. Hold that belief up against real data and it only partly survives. SwitchWize maintains its own first-party rate-tracking database, built from the same scraping and observation pipeline that powers the site's live rate pages, and it let us ask a cleaner question than the usual "rates went up" headline: over a stretch where the Fed Funds rate provably did not move, did bank rates move anyway?

We pulled every high-yield savings and money market account with a continuous observation history spanning at least 80 of the last 95 days, comparing the earliest and latest recorded APY for each. The Fed Funds rate over that same window: flat. FRED's own effective-rate series shows no change between the start and end of the window; the last actual Fed move on record predates this entire study.

What actually happened: HYSAs

Three out of four accounts stayed put, which is unsurprising with the Fed on hold. But nearly one in four moved regardless, and the moves were not small. The five largest increases and five largest cuts among tracked HYSAs:

What actually happened: money market accounts

The pattern repeats, at a smaller scale. Of 46 tracked money market accounts with a continuous 80+ day history, 2 raised, 7 cut, and 37 held flat.

Checking accounts, by contrast, were nearly frozen: of 38 tracked accounts, only one (CIT Bank, -15 bps) moved at all over the same window. Checking yields are already so low across the industry that there is little room, or incentive, for a bank to move them either direction.

Why banks move even when the Fed doesn't

Our companion piece on deposit beta explains why big banks pass through so little of a Fed move: they hold enough sticky, low-cost deposits that they have little competitive reason to pay more. This study points at a related but separate mechanism. A bank's savings or money market rate is also a lever the bank pulls for its own funding reasons that have nothing to do with the Fed on a given week:

• Catching up to the market. A bank that let its rate drift stale relative to competitors, like First National Bank of America's move from 2.25% to 4.00%, can raise sharply to stop losing new deposits, independent of Fed policy.
• Slowing deposit inflows. A bank that already gathered more deposits than it has profitable ways to lend can cut its rate to cool inflows, exactly the kind of move that shows up as one of the cuts above.
• Promotional cycling. Some online banks run time-limited promotional APYs that step down after an introductory period regardless of what the Fed is doing, which can show up in tracked data as a rate cut with no Fed-side explanation at all.
• Competitive repricing. A bank watching a direct competitor raise its rate may follow within weeks, on its own schedule, not the Fed's meeting calendar.

What this means for where you keep your cash

The Bank Gap Index research documents a persistent gap between the national-average savings rate and the best widely available rate. This study adds a related, and slightly less comfortable, finding: the rate you have today is not a fixed reference point just because the Fed hasn't met or hasn't moved. It can quietly become less competitive, or more competitive elsewhere, for reasons that have nothing to do with monetary policy, and there is no news alert for it.

The practical response does not change: check your actual rate against the top of the market periodically, not just after a Fed announcement. Money Map runs that check automatically against SwitchWize's own live rate data, the same underlying pipeline behind this study.

Methodology

Every account included had a continuous observation history in SwitchWize's rate_observations dataset spanning at least 80 of the trailing 95 days as of August 20, 2026, comparing the first and last recorded APY in that window. Accounts with gaps larger than 15 days, or without both an early and late reading, were excluded rather than estimated. Moves smaller than 1 basis point were treated as noise (rounding/re-scrape artifacts) and counted as unchanged. CD, mortgage, and credit card categories were evaluated with the same method but did not have enough continuously-tracked, single-product histories over the window to support a reliable claim, so they are not included here; this is a data-coverage limitation of the current tracking window, not a finding that those categories held flat. The Fed Funds comparison uses the Federal Reserve's own effective-rate series (FRED) for the same window. This is a description of what happened in SwitchWize's own tracked dataset over a specific historical window, not a forecast or a claim about the full market of every deposit account in the country.